This is the view from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in May 1997.
Below, I’ve adjusted the image. Maybe this is how it would have looked in the late ’40s. At least, a bit like the postcard representation of the canyon in that era.
In any case, grand in all the senses of that word.
Lake Michigan was active but not stormy on Saturday. Views from Loyola.
There’s a coffee-table book in this: chain-hung Chicago signs.
High-res images, of course. Can go on the same coffee table with Austin neon.
Also Chicago. Specifically, on the street. Make that in the street: a Toynbee tile-like embedment doing its part to remind us of the beleaguered Ukrainians.
Recently I started reading Illegal Tender, subtitled “Gold, Greed and the Mystery if the Lost 1933 Double Eagle,” by David Tripp (2004). A remainder table find some years ago; nice hardback. As it says, the book tells the intriguing (to me) story of the 1933 Double Eagle, which tends to make lists of the world’s most valuable coins, along with the likes of the Brasher Doubloon, the 1804 Bust Dollar and the 1913 Liberty Nickel. Coins so special that their names are capitalized.
On that particular list, I hadn’t heard of the 723 Umayyad Caliphate Gold Dinar, but wow, what a name, with images of ancient treasure in distant lands woven right into the words. The 1913 Liberty Nickel was the MacGuffin in an episode of the original Hawaii 5-0. Namely, “The $100,000 Nickel,” which first aired on December 11, 1973.
“A rare 1913 Liberty Head nickel, one of only five ever made, is to be auctioned at a coin show held at the Ilikai Hotel,” says the imdb entry on the episode. “European master criminal Eric Damien gets con artist and sleight-of-hand expert Arnie Price freed from jail so that he can switch a cleverly-made fake with the original before the auction. But things do not go as planned, as Price, fearing capture, tries to dispose of the nickel in a news rack, and the chase is on to recover the nickel before anyone else finds it.”
Naturally, McGarrett and his men recover the nickel. I don’t remember that specifically, even though I saw that episode either that day or on repeat, but that’s a safe assumption for the denouement. I do remember that I’d heard of the nickel before, probably in a Coins or Coinage article.
I think the episode at least partly inspired one of the Super 8 movies I made with friends David and Steve in junior high, The $300,000 Dime, which I think involved Swiss operative Hans Lan foiling the theft of the titular dime. Sadly, this and the other Hans Lan story, The Assassin, plus the SF non-epic Teedees of Titan and a couple of others whose names I’ve forgotten, are lost as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, except that no one cares.
We were in Niles, Illinois, on Sunday, which you might call a north-northwest suburb. It’s also a close-in suburb, since it has a border with Chicago along Touhy Ave. at one point.
On the Niles side of that road stands the Leaning Tower of Niles, which was built, unlike the one in Italy, to lean on purpose. I’d seen it before, decades ago, but Yuriko hadn’t. So we took a look.
“In 1932, industrialist and inventor Robert Ilg constructed a recreational park for his employees,” the Encyclopedia of Chicago says. “Although the Ilg Hot Air Electric Ventilating Co., later Ilg Industries, was located in Chicago, Ilg lived in Niles.
“He installed two swimming pools and a water tower which he hid behind a half-size replica of Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1960, the Ilg family turned over part of the park property to the Leaning Tower Young Men’s Christian Association. The tower has since been restored and is a symbol of the community. In 1991, Niles and Pisa became sister cities.”
At one time, you could take tours of the interior, but not now. The tower has bells, since it’s a replica of a campanile, but we didn’t hear them ring. Its restoration, like that of the tower in Pisa, probably means that it’s stable, like the tower in Pisa. Still, it’s a little unnerving, standing near that lean.
It also makes me want to see the original. At twice the height of the one in Niles, that’s got to be impressive. And maybe a little unnerving, too.
Today would have been a pleasant day in February: rainy and in the 40s F. In May, you grumble: where’s my missing 30 degrees? The grass is lush and the trees are budding, but so what. When it finally gets warm, though, all will be forgotten.
After lunch on Saturday, I decided a good use of the afternoon would be to visit another sacred space I’d long known about, but never ventured inside, like the Chapel of St. James that morning. That meant an El ride north from downtown to the Loyola stop at the edge of the Rogers Park neighborhood, the northernmost bit of the city on Lake Michigan.
Years ago, I lived a few stops south of Loyola, and occasionally went there. Mostly to visit a bookstore on Sheridan just outside Loyola University’s Lake Shore campus — or was it two bookstores and a raft of other oddball retail? Looking around Sheridan now, there’s no trace of the late ’80s retail that once was there. That isn’t a surprise, but it’s a touch melancholic all the same.
Black Star was the name of the bookstore I remember best. An 1989 article in the Chicago Tribune noted: “Walk up a flight of stairs and you will enter a red and black labyrinth — two of the colors of the Holy Roman Empire`s coat of arms — containing thousands of used books, from dirt-cheap paperbacks to equally cheap hardcovers. There’s a tiny cafe in the back-six wooden tables surrounded by large ferns — where you can sip coffee and tea and munch on some pastries…
“Specialties: Psychology, religion, philosophy, literature, history, occult, art, language, film, romance, mystery, children’s, science, drama, science fiction. Particularly strong in the literature, philosophy and history of the European peoples.”
I bought a few books there. Just another lost bookstore now. I’ve known quite a few.
Back in the present, I walked through the Loyola campus and before long came to the Madonna della Strada Chapel, which is Loyola Chicago’s main chapel. Finished in 1939.
“The curving Art Moderne form is reminiscent of a small dirigible or airplane hanger,” the AIA Guide to Chicago says of the design by Chicago architect Andrew Rebori. “The walls of the apse are ‘accordioned’ — the folds filled with glass blocks, which admit slim slices of light. Names of famous Jesuits are crispy incised along the roofline; the tall tower is flat-topped and windowless.”
The entrance, which faces Lake Michigan.
I’ve read that it was put there in anticipation of facing a northward extension of Lake Shore Drive, presumably all the way to Evanston, but that never happened.
The stained glass is artful. My pictures of it, not so much — that’s a hard thing to photograph, in my experience. Other artwork was easier to capture.
Martyrs on the wall.
To the left, for instance, is René Goupil, S.J., venerated as the first Jesuit martyr of Canada, who took a Mohawk tomahawk to the head in the mid-17th century. It was a tough posting.
The main event on Saturday was lunch with two old friends, Neal and Michele, who live in the city. We ate at the informal dining room of the Union League Club in the Loop and then took an informal tour of the building, which dates from the 1920s and is alive with art on its walls and an elegant, sometimes sweeping, interior design. Informal tour means we wandered around some of the floors and looked at things. An enjoyable walk through with friends; and an in-person experience.
Michele and Neal, 1989.
Before I met them, I took the El to River North and walked to Rush Street. Eating and drinking establishments remain, but the street isn’t anything like it was 40+ years ago, I’ve read. By the time I visited Rush occasionally, starting in the late ’80s, most of that scene had evaporated, but I’ve had a few good meals on the street over the decades, such as a lunch — or was it dinner? — with Jay ca. 2002.
There we are.
One thing that would have been on the street 40 years ago is Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary, a seminary prep school run by the Archdiocese. The school had a chapel. It still reaches skyward, but not as much as the nearby towers on Michigan Avenue. 
The school closed early in the 21st century, and these days the Archdiocese of Chicago occupies the space. The chapel — the Chapel of St. James — was dedicated in 1920, and hasn’t been changed at all since then, except for a recent thorough restoration that took 14 years.
A helpful docent showed us around. One thing she mentioned was that Zachary Taylor Davis did the design. He also did other well-known buildings, namely Wrigley Field.
“I wondered about that for a while, but then a person on one of my tours said, ‘They’re both places of worship,’ and I had to agree with that,” the docent said.
The chapel’s stained glass, which we got to see with the chapel lights off and then on, was patterned after that in Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. I’m pretty sure I visited Sainte-Chapelle, but the memory has faded.
My images are pale moons of the quiet luminousness of the windows.
Pale moons will have to do. They stretch up toward near the ceiling, reminding me of the tall arrays of windows at Heinz Memorial Chapel in Pittsburgh. One wall features Old Testament stories. The wall behind the altar, New Testament stories. The other wall, church history.
On Saturday I spent much of the day in downtown Chicago, for the first time in more than two years, except for a short transit from Midway to Union Station returning from Savannah. Mostly, I’d just gotten out of the habit. Even though I got rained on sometimes — a drizzle some of the time — I was still glad to walk a dozen or more city blocks, ride the El a couple of times, and see what there was to see.
That morning I drove to a parking garage near O’Hare and took the El the rest of the way into the city. Late in the afternoon, I returned the same way. When I’d entered the subway in the city to board the train, the skies were gray and menacing, but the rain had stopped a few hours earlier.
A half-hour later, when the train emerged from a tunnel to run down the median of the Kennedy Expressway toward O’Hare, sheets of rain were pouring on the highway and tapping the top of the train car. Water streaked the windows. I could see wind moving barely green tree branches and bushes off the side of the road. Suddenly, everyone’s phones buzzed a tornado warning from the National Weather Service.
The car was about half full, so the sound of the alert was distinct, seemingly coming from all directions. You’d think there might have been some comment among the passengers about that, but everyone went on with their business — that is, quietly interacting with their phones.
By the time I got off the train and to the garage, the rain had slacked off. By the time I was about half way home on the roads between O’Hare and my part of the northwest suburbs, not only had it quit raining, but the sun peaked out from behind the clouds. I got home and found no damage or even very many large puddles. The storm had passed pretty quickly, it seems. It rained again later that night, but nothing like the violence of the afternoon storm.
At about 7:30, I looked out into my back yard and noticed a rainbow. Actually, a faint double rainbow.
Actually, a near-full rainbow.
Nice way to end a cold, wet April.